Employees are demanding more and more that their companies' IT department support the devices they want to use. This is known as Bring Your Own Device (“BYOD”) trend. Employees also prefer to carry one device that can be used for both business and personal purposes. The enterprises are looking for ways to increase employee productivity and reduce mobility costs. To strike a balance, enterprises may allow for device flexibility while at the same time investing in the platforms to address the security and management challenges presented by employees bringing their mobile devices into work.
There are several applications today such as, for example, Good for Enterprise (“Good”) that provide a way to keep business data and applications on a user device separate from personal data and applications in support of the BYOD trend. The solution such as Good works by creating an encrypted block of memory on the user device (i.e. sandbox, container, etc.) where business data and applications can reside and managed separately from personal data and applications (i.e. everything else on the device). The vendors in this space have also typically provided a management tool for enterprises to create and enforce policies over the mobile device sandbox/container. For example, Good provides a tool called Good Mobile Manager that performs this policy management function over their proprietary mobile device sandbox technology.
Sandboxing/containerization technology has been around for several years. However, such technology does not address how to apply different routing and billing models for different types of data transmitted over the air between the mobile device and the wireless service provider. Mobile data generated by a subscriber has generally been considered to be in one class and billed against the account that is liable for the line of service regardless of whether the mobile data is work-related or personal related. Although the concept of providing a separate bill to the enterprise for business data usage consumed from a user's device has been discussed with customers and the analyst community, a need still exists to implement such concept and separate data consumption based on persona type (e.g., personal persona and business personal). This allows a wireless service provider to provide two types of data services for a single subscriber.